Samuel's sleep began gently enough weightless drifting, like sinking into a warm sea. But soon the waters thickened, turned brackish and cold. His limbs grew heavy, pinned by nothing, his lungs straining for air that would not come.
The dream changed.
He was standing or thought he was in a place that did not have ground, only endless black stretching beneath him, vast and alive. The air pressed tight against his chest, thick with a sour, metallic tang that clawed at his throat. Each breath burned like inhaling smoke.
Then, sound. Not words. Not yet. A low vibration tremored through the void, rattling his bones, sinking deep into his marrow. It was not heard so much as felt a pulse that dragged at the edges of his mind, pulling, pulling, until he wanted to scream just to release the pressure.
"...Samuel."
The voice was a thousand voices. A whisper behind his ear and a roar across eternity. His name cracked through the air like iron tearing. His knees buckled under the weight of it.
Shapes emerged from the dark, not seen but imposed jagged silhouettes that shifted the longer he looked, writhing with movements that made no sense. Some were too vast, blotting out what little horizon existed; others pressed too close, brushing against his skin though he could not see them. Every brush seared cold fire into his flesh, and he flinched though there was nowhere to retreat.
"Why… do you write me?" the voice groaned, splitting and rejoining in unnatural rhythm. "Why do you carve my name into your fragile world?"
Samuel's throat moved but no sound came. His jaw locked, his tongue dried, and terror welded him mute. He tried to back away, to move, but the void clutched him still tighter, forcing his body into silence as surely as the voice pressed against his mind.
"You disturb what should be untouched. You scratch at the edges of the veil."
From the dark, an eye opened. Vast. Lidless. Its iris stretched in patterns that defied symmetry, colors no human eye was made to hold, bleeding into each other like oil on water. It looked at him. Through him. And Samuel's mind convulsed, a storm of alien thoughts flooding his skull until he nearly tore at his scalp to be free of them.
"You make me wake," the voice thundered. Anger, ancient and smothered, rumbled through the black like a quake tearing mountains apart. "You drag me from silence into noise. Why should I not drag you into mine?"
The void convulsed. Shapes pressed closer. The eye widened. And Samuel felt the weight of infinite cold oceans closing over his head, pressing, crushing, suffocating. His chest heaved, his lungs screamed for air, and for a heartbeat too long he believed he would die here, pulled into the thing he had only dared to imagine in ink.
Then
He gasped awake.
Sweat dampened the sheets. His chest rose and fell in slow, steady rhythm, a picture of peaceful sleep.
Samuel didn't stir. Didn't remember. His breathing settled, body sinking deeper into his pillow. To him, the night was dreamless.
Something vast and furious had touched him.
And it wanted silence.